Anime Kills
by Dakana Garretson
Summary: this is my first Criminal Minds fanfic so please be nice. While at Otacon, Reid finds a body which leads him and the team to follow a murderer who loves anime and manga to death.
1. Murder like a ninja?

Spencer Reid liked Manga ...

He liked Anime ...

He was a self proclaimed Otaku. He managed to keep it away from his friends at work, as he knew they just wouldn't understand, and it would undeniably become the butt of many jokes. He had always liked books since he was young, and Japanese graphic novels were no different. They had a certain grace and maturity. The adventurous stories never let you forget that deep down they were adult and mature without rubbing it in your face, and the comedies could make fun of themselves without going over the top. They appealed to his intellect as works of art, in both the artwork and the writing. He knew that he was one of the few people to think of it with such high regard, but he didn't care.

Of course, as an Otaku, there was a single day that he would always take away from work. The convention known as Otacon, the place where all Otakus get together, buy memorabilia, meet the people who helped the different anime happen (or at least their english renditions), and altogether have fun. He never explained why he took the day off to his superiors, because he simply knew how they would react. Aaron would give him the strange look he always gave whenever he explained the situation to its full extent (why he did that was beyond Reid, he was simply explaining what was going on ...), David would simply shrug it off as one more of Reid's "things", and so on. Garcia may understand, herself being a fan of Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, but ... he didn't want to risk it. Besides, if it turned out she did like it, the thought of her dressing as a night elf really didn't seem all that appealing.

He walked through the convention, looking at all of the different costumes that people were wearing (he himself dressed as Kabuto from the series Naruto), and browsing items that people had on sale. He'd already bought a number of collectables, as well as manga volumes and anime dvds for his collection. He glanced at his watch. In 15 minutes time, Vic Mignogna would be answering questions. Reid didn't REALLY like English voice actors, but ... there was something about Vic that he liked.

Reid made his way through the crowds, when the con was shook by a huge scream. Reid immediately went into alert mode, and looked around carefully for the source. He saw nearby a woman, her face washed out completely white. He rushed to her and put his arm around her, giving her support.

"Are you okay?" Reid asked, concerned. "What happened?"

The woman gulped a few times, having difficulty getting the words out

"A man ... he's ... he's been killed! In ... there!" she pointed behind her.

Reid helped her to the floor, leaning her against a wall, and went in. No sooner had he seen the crime scene that his hand went straight to his cellphone. He didn't want them to see him like this ... but there was no alternative.

Within minutes, Aaron Hotchner had arrived with the team close behind. Reid led them through to the room where the body lay. Derek looked at Reid curiously.

"Okay then, so who are you supposed to be? Some kinda magic man?"  
"actually, I'm Kabuto Yakushi, Medical ninja of Otogakure, right hand man of the leader of the Village Orochimaru, the master of snake arts and ..."

"Reid!" shouted David from behind "this isn't the time. There's a dead body in here, keep your mind focused on the job at hand!"

Reid sighed and led them on. He had only been answering a question ...

They arrived to the room where the man lay undisturbed.

"what kind of sick mind could do this to another man?" Derek asked, looking at the body in front of him.

The man was laying face down on the floor, both of his arms cut so that they would have been useless to him if he had been alive, and his back pierced with items reminiscent of spears and other weapons like them.

Reid stepped forwards "I believe I can cast light on the situation. The man here was cosplaying as ..."

"Cosplay?" Aaron asked

"oh yes I'm sorry you're not in with the culture. It means Costume Play, where fans of a character dress like them at these conventions"

"So its grown up fancy dress" Derek pointed out

"Essentially, yes, that's true, but not as childish" Reid corrected, his voice featuring a small amount of pride as Aaron simply raised an eyebrow looking at the costumed Reid in front of him.

Reid turned back to the body laying in front of him, and continued his point.

"He is cosplaying as Zabuza from the series Naruto, he was the first major villain of the series and ... this is how he died. After having his arms paralyzed by Kakashi Hatake, and being attacked with multiple weapons to his back, he finally falls to his death after dealing the death blow to the one who set him up to do this, Gato. I must say that although its a gruesome death, it is a very accurate rendition of the scene."

Derek and Hotch stared on wondering if Reid realised how wrong it was to know all of that and to be able to remember it so quickly ... and to even think of it as an achievement.

David looked around the body, not caring what had been said, searching for anything that could point to the killer, something the others SHOULD have been doing instead of talking. He reached down ... and picked up a piece of paper. It had a word and numbers written on it. It read "One Piece 06 51". He handed it to Reid to look at

"One Piece ... ' the name of an anime and manga series by Echiiro Oda ... but the numbers I don't understand"

David sighed and gave him a stern look "Then you had better work it out quickly Einstein, because I have a feeling this will lead us to his next target, and we better get to him before he does ... we cannot let him kill again!"


	2. Death of a Swordsman

The team had cordoned off an area of the convention room to use as their temporary base of operations. They had tried to get in touch with Garcia, but to no avail. She had said she was busy and out of town that weekend, and of course nobody knew exactly where to find her. They were, at the present time, Garcia-less.

Aaron paced back and forth. He was used to brutality, but to use THIS much, even if it was to recreate a scene from a Japanese comic, it was ... obscene. He turned to Reid.

"Spencer, I want you to go around the hall and question all of the visitors here, see if they've seen and strange looking ... no wait, suspicious looking people". Behind them, Derek let out a small snigger, and Spencer looked between them with a blank look on his face. He didn't get the joke.

He never did.

David walked in from the outside, fumbling with his phone.

"I've tried to call Garcia, but wherever she is, she isn't answering her phone, or even responding to her texts. I've called her three times and left two mes..."

He was cut off by a cry from near the door, and they turned to see a giant cat ... no ... somebody DRESSED like a giant cat, running towards them, waving.

It was Garcia.

They looked at her in silence, not even Derek knew how to handle this.

"I'm sorry, with all the noise next door I couldn't hear the phone ringing. Then I heard of a murder, so I thought to call you guys only to find you'd already arrived. I suppose I do work fast"

Derek just stared and asked "What ... ARE you?"

"I'm a cat ... well, a Furry cat" she responded, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Nobody answered her, leaving only silence. Even the crowd around them seemed to have gone silent. "its a completely normal thing to do! There are thousands of us". Nothing.

Meanwhile, walking around the convention hall, Reid was talking to the people, paying special attention to the people in cosplay of shows he happened to like ... not that he thought they were suspicious at all, just that he wanted to talk to people with what he thought of as good taste. He had taken off his cosplay headband in accordance with Aaron's wishes that he remove his costume. The headband was enough ... right?

Reid was walking through, when one of the vendors called him over

"You're with the cops ain't ya?" he asked

Reid nodded "yes. Well actually I'm with the BAU investigating this crime ... and also with Otogakure" he added, giving a small chuckle to the joke. He didn't care if the vendor didn't get it, it was his joke after all, and in his mind, as long as he found it funny, it was.

"Yeah" the man said "well I saw a man acting really strange around here. He was looking at all these manga volumes, askin' if I had any where the characters get badly injured or killed. I showed him them, of course. Gotta get the business. He took them, looked, jotted some numbers down, and then left. Is that of any help?"

Spencer thought

"have you got One Piece volume 6?".

The man looked confused

"sure I have ... here, you can take a look at it if you want"

Spencer took it and flicked through the book.

Meanwhile, Daniel, a young man who was at Otacon, went into the toilets. He was jumpy, well who wouldn't be after someone getting murdered. He adjusted his costume, and went into the room. He saw a man standing at the sinks washing his hands. He gave him a nod and walked past. He heard a noise. The man tapped him on the shoulder ... and then pain

The cry of pain crashed through the convention hall. Reid looked over, kicking himself for not realising the meaning of the piece of paper soon enough. He threw some money to the vendor and ran, carrying the book.

Reid got there first to find ... a sight for sore eyes. The man had been cut diagonally across his torso, with a blood spray continuing along that line. This was brutally accurate. David and Aaron came in after, followed by Derek. They looked at the body on the floor.

There was a note

it said "Bleach 3 21"

"the next one will be cosplaying Ichigo Kurosaki ... and will be impaled through the chest"

David looked at him "how do you know that?"

Reid took the piece of paper out of his pocket from the last scene. "This says One Piece 6 51. In volume 6 of One Piece, 51st chapter, Roronoa Zoro gets sliced through the chest by Mihawk. It didn't kill him but it should be enough to kill a normal human ... which is what we have here, a man dressed as Zoro sliced through the chest. This piece of paper features a chapter of Bleach where main character Ichigo gets impaled by a spike like appendage of a hollow ... that's where our unsub will strike next"

Aaron looked to him and nodded "well done Spencer. We know what to look for, but we still need to work out how, why, and who he looks for in his targets"

David looked back over at the body and closed his eyes

"We need to hurry. This guy's clearly brutal, he's willing to do anything in the name of accuracy of murder, and in the looks of things, he's killing quicker than before ... we don't have much time"


	3. an imperfect Irony

The room roared with speech, as the silence created from the shock of the murder had now changed into a nervous uproar, everybody worrying about who would be next. David tried to shout through the noise, but to no avail. Finally, he made his way to the intercom system. It was for emergencies only, and if this didn't count as an emergency, then nothing did.

"Excuse me!" he called, his voice echoing throughout the hall

"We have reason to believe that a man in fancy dress..."  
"cosplay, actually" Reid corrected from behind  
"... Yeah, anyway, anyone who's in fancy dress as a man named ... Ichigo Kurosaki ... can you please come and gather around here. Everybody else move back , and nobody leave the room! Thank you!"

he placed down the mouth piece, and turned to his team

"There, so all the people dressed as this guy will gather around us, we can watch them easier that way, how many of them can there be?"

ten minutes later, there was a small crowd of people dressed in black gowns, carrying swords of different sizes and qualities, some made of metal, some of wood, and some obviously cut out of cardboard and painted the right colours.

David sighed "there are this many people dressed as a single character? He must be popular enough to ..."

he turned around to notice one of the costumed men sniggering to himself

"okay, what's the big joke?" he asked, sharply

"its just ... " the man couldn't speak properly for laughing "... you sound JUST LIKE a guy from the Simpsons, dude!"

David sighed "do I LOOK like the godfather to you?"

he turned back around

"We still have a problem ..." Aaron interjected

"we've got all of his targets into an area where they can all be easily protected, so what if he changes his target? There are so many people here that it would be easy to pick someone else"

"I doubt it" Reid said "He knows the specific point where his targets die down to the volume number and chapter. He's planning it out in advance, just like the manga themselves. I doubt he would change it when he's put so much time into planning it. I wouldn't be surprised if he'd already picked out which one of these people he would take out"

Aaron and David looked over the crowd assembled. There were many different people dressed as many different things, some looked heroic, some more like monsters than anything else. There was no real visual cue to give them any sort of clue as to who the unsub could be. That would be too easy.

There were so many variables. What would they be dressed as? Would they be as a villain to show their true villainy? Would they be dressed as a hero to hide their motives, or did they think they were doing something heroic? Were they even in costume at all? Could they just hate costumes, or the characters they displayed? What connection could there possibly be between them?

All of these questions were constantly going through the heads of all the team members ... until they heard a gunshot in the distance. Aaron, David, and Derek drew their guns and ran towards the sound, with Reid running behind them. Garcia was left to keep an eye on the gathered costumed people, though she was taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi to level up on her new online rpg. It was to die for.

The team ran towards the noise, hoping to catch the unsub in the act. They got to a corner, blocked from the sight of the regular con-goers by a number of stands. There was a dead man slumped in the corner, with a piece of paper attached to him. It had one word written on it.

"Filler"

David looked around for the culprit, but nobody seemed suspicious.

"what's a filler?" Aaron asked to Spencer

"A filler in an anime series is when the animated version of a manga has caught up to the comic, and needs to create new storylines so as to make a bigger gap"

"In other words ... its there to buy time?" asked Spencer, looking back over to the other side of the room

"Hey" said a woman from the sidelines "maybe you should question the security guard. He was the first person here, he checked him over and said he was going to take care of something ... dunno what, but you should definitely talk to him, he might know stuff"

Aaron and David looked at eachother, nodded, and ran through the crowd back to where they had been to start with.

Where they should never have left.

A security guard walked through the mass of Ichigos, looking at them one by one, before grabbing one, pulling him to the wall where Garcia sat. She quickly got up, rushing towards him, attempting a fruitless attempt to stop him before he drew his gun and pointed it at her. He took a strange looking piece of metal from his belt, holding it at the cosplayer's chest. As he did this, the man stopped struggling. One more movement and he would be dead.

"This isnt the way I had hoped to do this but at least i'll manage to get rid of you!" said the security guard, smirking to himself.

Aaron ran through the crowd with Derek, holding their guns pointed at the guard.

"stop right there, let him go and give up!"

the guard laughed "you don't get it ... you've lost this one. The reason you're asking me to give up is because you know that you won't actually win in a confrontation"

Aaron had to be careful, waiting for the right moment. He couldn't get a clear shot at the unsub, and even if he could, he had to at LEAST try and reason with him.

Spencer walked forwards

"You're not in with this, but you have a strong sense of justice don't you? You want to prove something to these people, make a point"

the guard looked at him, his smirk replaced by a nervous smile "how ... did you work out I wasn't one of these people?"

Spencer looked him over "its simple, I worked it out when I worked out what the notes meant. You looked at the volume of the manga to find out what was happening and when exactly the deaths occurred. You COULD just not follow the manga, but then if you wanted to know enough about the series, if you were an otaku you would buy the volumes. You didn't, you just read it and left it. You wanted to find it and that was all, just an excuse for a kill"

the guard looked around at the people watching "but ... cant you see? These kids, spending all their times trying to be someone else! They're wasting their lives ... and if they don't use them properly, they don't even deserve them! Make room for people who wont waste their lives away pretending to be people they're not going on adventures that they can never hope to! I mean, even when I gave them clues, they couldn't even notice it."

"and so you planned it out to kill them in the most ironic way, killing them the same way as their "time-wasting heroes", right?"

"exactly ... their obsession ended up killing them, I'd say its the perfect punishment"

Derek, Reid, and Aaron watched, then looked to behind him

the man looked confused, but couldn't turn around, not without letting go of the gun or the cosplayer.

"what ... what are you looking at? What are yo ..."

there was a thud, and the man hit the floor

David stood behind him armed with a small-ish orange sphere. He handed it back to a Goku cosplayer.

"Didn't see that coming did you? Death in prison at the end of your life sentence, the David Rossi show"

- - - -

Reid sat back on the plane back home, thinking to himself, considering what was said.

Charles F. Kettering once said, "Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future."

The man had his own plan for how people should live their lives, and he considered anything else to be a waste, for them to be following their imagination instead of reality, but it wasn't true. Imagination and fantasy is one of the greatest things to exist. Without it, our lives would be empty, and we would lose so much of what we were. This man failed to understand this, and with his job making him spend so much time with the people he detested, he began to hate them for what they were, for what they did, and every part of their lives. He stopped seeing them as people with imaginations, and started seeing them as massive wastes of time.

Some people cant see. Some people will never see. Some people get effected the hard way ... and they end up coming crashing down.

... its a tragedy, but its why we exist. To stop them.

Reid sat back. He had found and stopped the killer. They had made their moves strategically, and he had fallen into the trap that even they didn't know they had set. He was pleased with himself ...

... plus he'd gotten the Son-Goku figure he'd wanted for a long time, it had been a good trip.

[Writer comments : So, this is the end of my first Criminal Minds fanfic. I hope you liked it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope you didnt think the ending was too sudden. To me ... I dunno, it seemed like it worked as a twist ending. if youve got any praise or ideas of how i can make it better please let me know thank you ^^. Ive started work on my next Criminal Minds fanfic, with the working title of "Massively Multiplayer Murder"]


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